HSTRY 498
LATINX: A HEMISPHERIC AMERICAS HISTORY
This course will focus on the multiple journeys of the heterogenous communities living in what it has become known today as the United States but whose ancestry and living experiences connect them to those Latin American countries previously under Portuguese and Spanish colonial control. We will primarily investigate the struggles, negotiations, and forms of resistance unleashed by colonial rule and continuing structures of coloniality that have led many to cross into, and sometimes out of, US political borders. Undoubtedly, we will consider how and why such borders have been drawn, shifted, made porous, and/or hardened at different historical moments. And, we will uncover how hierarchies of difference such as ethno-race, gender, sexuality, language, and religion have affected the experiences of displacement, migration, resettlement, community building, remittances, and return.
Our journey will begin in the nineteenth century but we will spend most of our time in the twentieth century as we uncover how broader community designations such as Spanish, Hispanic, Latino/a, and Latinx have emerged, have been deployed for different reasons, and what are their limits. The course aims to explore different nodes of Latinx life in the United States such as New York City, Miami, Chicago, El Paso, and Los Angeles. We will learn about the various cycles of agricultural labor, manufacture, and service work that have made Latinx labor critical while also probe the authoritarian regimes, civil wars, climate-related disasters, and economic shifts in the Americas that have prompted peoples to move. Ultimately, this course argues that these are not isolated factors in one side or another of an always-shifting political border but that these are symbiotic, hemispheric and global dynamics occasioned by colonialism, imperial formations, and capitalism.
This class will meet in-person once a week as a seminar for discussion of assigned readings. We will have assigned one primary text which includes primary sources and historical essays, organized chronologically. We will be practicing primary document analysis regularly. Nevertheless, this is mainly a research course. Students are expected to produce a 12-15 pages research essay based on primary and secondary materials. Paper topics have to be directly related to class matters and approved in advanced by the professor. Students will be assessed in varied ways including weekly reading reflections, short writing assignments based on reading materials, in-class exercises such as short presentations on readings or ongoing research work, and the final paper (which will be scaffolded throughout the two terms to move the process along).
The professor reserves the right to make changes to the syllabus as needed but these will all be communicated in advance to students.